I was probably overprotective. Hemi
definitely
was.
But—skiing. Karen didn’t mind falling. It made her laugh. Not me, though. It made me tense up, and after about the ninth or tenth time, it just made me want to cry.
“Get your poles under you,” the instructor, an impossibly fit young brunette with a sparkling smile, coached me on Day Two as a very tiny child in a jumpsuit—and probably diapers—rocketed down the bunny slope next to where I lay sprawled. Well, it looked like rocketing to me. “Push up,” Ms. Skiing’s-Dead-Easy said, “and away you go.”
I struggled, felt snow going down my waistband, up my pant legs, and down my neck, swallowed past the tightness in my throat, blinked the tears back, and thought,
How about not.
After which I thanked the instructor very much, saw her taking her mental impression of American toughness down another notch, decided that Karen was going to have to carry the flag for both of us, and snowplowed my way down to the lodge—hey, at least I didn’t slide down on my butt—drank a hot chocolate, and told Hemi and Karen, when they showed up for lunch, “I’ve discovered there’s this thing called snowshoeing. I’m doing that.”
“You’re kidding,” Karen said. “Hope.
Lame.
What are you, an old lady?”
“I am somebody,” I said, doing my best to maintain my dignity, “who enjoys the gentler pursuits.”
“But you wouldn’t even get to go fast!” she said. “You’d be going exactly the same pace uphill and downhill, slogging along, and it’d be
hard
instead of fun
.
What’s the point?”
“That
is
the point.” I looked at Hemi. “Thank you for giving me the chance to discover skiing. And if you don’t pressure me to keep doing it, I’ll thank you even more. Consider that a clue.”
His eyes were warm, but he didn’t smile. “Don’t enjoy the thrills, eh.”
“Not this kind,” I said. “And life’s too short to do something you hate just because other people like it.”
Anika was probably an expert skier. And afterwards, she probably threw her head back and uttered a musical laugh in between posing in her skintight jumpsuit, tossing back flaming shots, and talking about double black diamond runs and how much better they were at some other resort.
As you can see, I’d spent a few non-skiing hours sitting around in the lodge over the past couple days, waiting for the others and people-watching. I was also grumpy.
Karen sighed, but Hemi said, “Right, then. Snowshoeing. Let’s find you a tour,” and smiled at me for real, and I thought,
I love you, you know?
So I did snowshoe, and all right, it wasn’t the most exciting adventure a person could ever have. On the other hand, I got solitude and space unimaginable to a girl from Brooklyn, some amazing views over snow-capped mountains, dreaming white-dusted hills, the green valley, and the blue jewel of the lake, and much less snow down my back.
Hemi didn’t hear from his lawyer until the day before we were due to fly back to New York, when we were at breakfast with Karen.
When his phone rang as he was working his way through a massive plate of eggs on toast with sausage, bacon, and sautéed mushrooms,and tomatoes, he glanced at the screen, answered, listened for a minute, and then said, “I’ll ring you back in fifteen minutes.”
He hung up and asked me, “D’you mind coming outside with me once we finish this, so we can take this call? It’s Walter.” And my heart skipped a couple beats.
Karen sighed and said, “This is the last time I go on vacation with you guys. I’m just saying.”
Hemi said, “Oh, really? Thought you were enjoying the skiing.” He was acting normal, so I did my best, too, even though I needed to hear what Walter said. No, I was
dying
to hear what Walter said. Hemi had wanted me to talk to his attorney
with
him, though, and was going out of his way to make that happen? That was what you’d call “major progress.”
Karen said, “The skiing part’s great. The New Zealand part rocks, too. It’s just all the…” She waved a hand. “Secret talks. Drama. Heartburn. I’m thinking about becoming a Buddhist, so you know.”
Hemi stopped cutting his slice of thick, meaty bacon and said, “A Buddhist, eh. Better eat your sausage while you can, I reckon.”
Karen said, “You don’t
have
to be a vegetarian to be a Buddhist,” and took another defiant bite of her own bacon.
“Good thing, too,” Hemi said. “As I expect we’d find you hiding in the toilets sneaking a hamburger.”
Karen said with dignity, “That’s the
superficial
explanation. It’s a lot more than that. A guy I know at school has been telling me about it. Noah Halliday. It’s not about eating meat, it’s about not getting attached, so everything isn’t such a huge deal. I mean, love’s great and all, I’m sure, having some kind of grand passion like you guys do, but wouldn’t it be better if you could just
go
with things? Noah says that if you’re Buddhist, you learn to accept change as the turn of the wheel, remember that other things will come along in your life, and serenely let it go and move on. Hope’s always so
worried.
Wouldn’t it be better not to be worried, or not to get mad like you do? I just want to be
happy
and take life as it comes
.
Can you really not see that that’s better?”
I was groping for an answer to that. I wasn’t supposed to have been worried? That was a character flaw? When I’d been nineteen and telling the funeral director, “No plot, and no casket, just the cremation” for my mother, because we’d needed that money for the rent? When I’d known I was the only thing between my eleven-year-old sister and foster care, so I’d better get over my fear and pain and sorrow in one big hurry and figure out how to take care of her, or she’d be lost?
All right, I wasn’t just “groping for an answer.” We’ll go ahead and call it “furious.”
I started to say something and bit it back, but Hemi said it for me. Still calmly, of course. I wouldn’t say he was great at not getting attached, but nobody did “controlled” like Hemi.
“I don’t think attachment means what you think it means,” he said. “Or Buddhism, either, though I can see why a sixteen-year-old boy might think the ‘accepting and moving-on’ bit sounded good. I’d have been all for that idea, myself, if I’d thought of it. I’d have talked it up to a girl or two, too, I’m sure.”
He shot a glance at me, and I said, “Or maybe you could go on and tell her that you
did
talk it up to a girl or two.”
He suppressed a smile and went on. “And as for Hope—maybe she’s been worried because she’s had to think about survival—for both of you, which is heaps harder than thinking about it for yourself, and scarier, too—when she wasn’t one bit ready for that. And she did it anyway, didn’t she? If she was worried, that just tells you how hard it was. That’s not weakness, and it’s not wrong. Who’s Noah Halliday when he’s at home? I’m taking a stab that his dad isn’t on the dole.”
You see why I loved this man?
Karen, of course, sighed. “I should have known you guys would react like this. He’s not sixteen. He’s seventeen, all right? He’s in the Gifted and Talented program with me, too, so he’s not exactly stupid. And so he’s not poor. Why does that matter?
You
aren’t poor, and
you
understand life.”
Hemi might have had a sardonic glint in his eye now. “Yeh, well, now isn’t then. Let’s say that my dad wasn’t paying school fees when I was seventeen. Let’s go on and say, in fact, that my dad wasn’t
around
when I was seventeen, and neither was my mum. Most of the people I know who don’t think about what’s going to come next, the ones who assume that the wheel will turn to something better? They’ve got somebody in mind they’re thinking will be handing them that something better. I’ve known a fair few people like that. Hope isn’t one of them.”
“All right, then,” Karen continued doggedly. “So you’re not spiritual, and Noah is. Not in some voodoo way, but in a
useful
way. I mean, why do people kill other people, and steal, and start wars? Because they get attached, right? And how come you and Hope fight? Because you’re so attached, which means everything matters so much and is this big drama. Just imagine if instead, you could accept things more. If you could go through life and have experiences, and not have drama. Noah says, if you’re not worried somebody will take your good thing away, then you can just enjoy it in the moment. So if you’re with somebody, and then it doesn’t work out? You just think, ‘The wheel has turned, and I probably needed that experience,’ and accept what happens next.”
Hemi said, “I think you’d better do a bit more research on Buddhism, because I reckon Noah’s version’s got more to do with being a teenage boy with hormones to spare than it does with religion. Ask yourself why he’d be telling you that. And tell
me
exactly
when
he told you that, and why you’re bringing it up now. Your school’s been out for two weeks.”
Karen flushed. “That’s not fair. He
does
care about what Buddhism really is. And so we email. I email with lots of people.”
“Not many of them telling you to hook up and move on, I’m guessing,” Hemi said. “That it’s more spiritual that way.”
“That’s not—” Karen was looking mulish now. She adored Hemi. What was going on?
“Anyway,” I hurried to say, “all I know is, I couldn’t do it, not the moving-on serene part. You’re right about that. It sounds like a pretty good way not to get to your golden anniversary, too, if you ask me.”
“Well, obviously
you
can’t,” Karen said. “Which is why you have to cry about Hemi and get worked up. Why couldn’t there be a better way? Noah says human beings were made to do things in phases. Like—serial monogamy. It’s natural, which is why so many people get divorced, or don’t get married at all, just love somebody and stop loving them and then move on. Noah’s dad has been divorced three times, and his mom has been divorced twice, and my parents weren’t even married, and they fought all the
time
. It’s more realistic if you accept that most of the time, it’ll end, and when you start fighting like that, you just leave. And then if it
does
last forever, you can just be really grateful, because you didn’t take it for granted. But most times, a relationship is good, and then it isn’t, so you let it go. You know—‘If you love something, let it go. If it’s meant to be yours, it will come back to you. If it doesn’t, it was never yours to begin with.’”
She said it like she’d invented it. Or, more likely, that Noah had.
“No,” Hemi said. “If you love something, hold it hard.” He took my hand, the one with his ring on it. He kissed my fingers, looked into my eyes, and smiled with the sweetness he rarely showed in public. “If you start deciding your good thing doesn’t matter to you one way or the other? You
will
be letting it go, because your good thing will find somebody else who knows how special she is. My good thing’s going to know I mean it, and that I mean to keep it.”
That was nice. That was
beautiful.
But I was still getting mad, and about more than Noah. “How about when you got sick?” I asked Karen. “If you’d died, should I have said, ‘Ah, well, the wheel has turned,’ and thought about how much I’d save in health insurance?”
“Now, see, Hope,” she said, “that’s just an example of how you don’t get it. It doesn’t mean you aren’t
sad.
It just means you
accept,
and you can move on.”
“Well, I don’t accept,” Hemi said. “Not the important things, I don’t, and I never will. And Hope isn’t going to accept, either. Some things you roll with, and some things you fight for. Noah doesn’t know the difference, because he’s seventeen.”
“Fine,” Karen said with a sigh. “I was just trying to tell you about an alternate spiritual path. I thought you might find it interesting.”
“Sorry your holiday’s been so drama-filled, anyway,” Hemi said. “We’ll have you bring a friend next time, maybe, so the two of you can roll your eyes at our inferior spiritual path. Wouldn’t be a bad thing at all to give you a bit of company if we do that Great Barrier Reef bit next time, eh. Which I’m guessing Hope will enjoy once she learns to swim, because there’s no going fast involved. It’s a very slow thing, snorkeling. She could even wear a life vest. And if the friend’s a Buddhist, that’ll be a bonus for you. You two could practice looking at the fish and corals and moving on. Although the Buddhist will need to be the female type, because I’m not taking Noah on my holiday.”
Karen looked at him doubtfully. “You’d really do that? I mean, take me
and
a friend with you, and pay for it? Even though I just got kind of…”
“Yeh. I would. Even though you just got passionate. I’m Maori. We understand passion, and we definitely understand family. That’s
our
spiritual path.”
“You’re not actually my…” She seemed to be groping for a word. “You don’t have to. You really
don’t
have to be attached.”
“Ah,” he said. “Except it seems I do. Not sure I’d be much chop as a Buddhist. But then, like I said, I was born into a different sort of path.”
“I’d think it
was
the same,” Karen said. “I thought being Maori was all sort of, the circle of life and all that.”
“Maybe with more attachment,” Hemi said. “Good topic for another day.” He asked me, “How about taking a couple deep breaths and finishing your breakfast, and reminding yourself that I’m going to be here for whatever comes up, because I hold hard?”
I had to smile at him, even though I
was
still a little upset. We finished eating, and Karen stayed in the café while Hemi and I went outside. We sat on a bench under an awning in a cold wind with our coats buttoned up, and Hemi pulled the phone out of his pocket, but he didn’t place the call right away. Instead, he said, “So. Noah the Unattached Buddhist. Got a feeling about which way he wants his temporary attachment to run.”
“Yep,” I said with a sigh. “Boy, do I feel unprepared for this.”